What I do deny is that it is real apart from nature, because that makes no sense. — Janus
The vast flow of perceptions, ideas, and emotions that arise in each human mind is something that, in Thomas Nagel's view, actually exists as something other than merely the electrical firings in the brain that gives rise to them—and exists as surely as a brain, a chair, an atom, or a gamma ray.
In other words, even if it were possible to map out the exact pattern of brain waves that give rise to a person’s momentary complex of awareness, that mapping would only explain the physical correlate of these experiences, but it wouldn’t be them. A person doesn’t experience patterns, and her experiences are as irreducibly real as her brain waves are, and different from them.
Nagel offers mental activity as a special realm of being and life as a special condition—in the same way that biology is a special realm of science, distinct from physics. His argument is that, if the mental things arising from the minds of living things are a distinct realm of existence, then strictly physical theories about the origins of life, such as Darwinian theory, cannot be entirely correct. Life cannot have arisen solely from a primordial chemical reaction, and the process of natural selection cannot account for the creation of the realm of mind. Biology, in his view, becomes a variety of science that is radically distinct from physics—it deals with a vast and crucial realm of phenomena that physics doesn’t and can’t encompass, precisely because they’re aspects of living things that are not physical:
subjective consciousness, if it is not reducible to something physical, … would be left completely unexplained by physical evolution—even if the physical evolution of such organisms is in fact a causally necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness.
Since neither physics nor Darwinian biology—the concept of evolution—can account for the emergence of a mental world from a physical one, Nagel contends that the mental side of existence must somehow have been present in creation from the very start. But then he goes further, into strange and visionary territory. He argues that the faculty of reason is different from perception and, in effect, prior to it—“an irreducible faculty.” He suggests that any theory of the universe, any comprehensive mesh of physics and biology, will need to succeed in “showing how the natural order is disposed to generate beings capable of comprehending it.”
My view is that universals and the like exist in the structure of our experience of the world. They are intrinsic to the way we interpret experience and construe meaning. So they're elements or aspects of reality, but they're neither subjective nor objective. They're neither 'out there' in the world, nor 'in here' in our minds, but are part of the structure of mind; but prior to any sense of 'mind' in a naturalistic sense, as the whole notion of what constitutes 'naturalism' relies on that structure. That is why nature exists in mind, more than vice versa. — Wayfarer
Did Kant think that on Hume's account, knowledge was impossible? — Marchesk
So now all the functions you ascribe to universals can be satisfactorily ascribed to a comparison to your ideal dog, which we've just established does not exist.
Is there any feature of our universalism in language that you're having trouble ascribing to an imagined ideal? — Pseudonym
Now I take it that if we can detail not just our own beliefs but the beliefs of others, and others can do the same for us, then that demonstrates that what people are saying is meaningful -- it's not just a nonsense that an individual has come up with. — Moliere
I'll tackle this first. This falls into the same error I've tried to explain to Marchesk, but it just gets ignored. Proving that people can make coherent sense, and derive meaning from, the question, or an answer offered is not sufficient to make the debate meaningful. To make the debate meaningful it is also necessary that some methods can demonstrably determine which of the competing answers has the greater merit by some metric agreed on by the contributors. — Pseudonym
I'll tackle this first. This falls into the same error I've tried to explain to Marchesk, but it just gets ignored. Proving that people can make coherent sense, and derive meaning from, the question, or an answer offered is not sufficient to make the debate meaningful. To make the debate meaningful it is also necessary that some methods can demonstrably determine which of the competing answers has the greater merit by some metric agreed on by the contributors. — Pseudonym
Looks like this is where we disagree anyways, — Moliere
I don't think you'll find your standard of meaningful debate outside of philosophy, though. It's just how human beings are -- they become attached to certain positions and argue for them. Scientific theory changes not so much because of pure rational debate, though that is a part of science, but also because stubborn old codgers who love their ideas die, and the young aren't attached to them. — Moliere
So what is it to have a meaningful debate, then? And by "meaning" are you talking about linguistic meaning (which the use of "nonsense" or "senseless", two terms that I think are different, seems to imply) or are you talking about meaning in the sense of the point of it all, the reason why a debate would take place? — Moliere
The thing is you can accuse political debates of having this problem. Does that mean the issues being debated lack meaning? — Marchesk
So with science, you may say that there's no definitive shared metric, and you'd be right, but the correlation of some theoretical proposition with empirical measurements is sufficiently shared and just specific enough to allow meaningful debate. It's not so shared that people like Kuhn can't highlight its reliance on paradigm, but they're shared enough. — Pseudonym
You did so on the grounds that anti-metaphysical statements are meaningless. You even stated as much in the first sentence of the previous post. — Marchesk
what motivates the questioning — SophistiCat
The difference between the individual things we perceive, and our universal talk about them. — Marchesk
(2) what it is that you actually want explained, and (3) what kind of an explanation you require. — SophistiCat
(2) Whether there is something in the world which matches or supports our universal talk.
(3) An argument for something in the world or in our concepts that explain the universal talk. — Marchesk
(4) There have been at least 4 possible answers given to this question: nominalism, conceptualism, moderate realism (Aristotle), and realism (Platonism). — Marchesk
Right. But you don't see numbers in nature, do you? I mean, there are books about the mathematical regularities found in nature, the fibonacci sequence, and so on - which are very interesting, to be sure. But numbers aren't found in nature, as such. They're not 'out there somewhere' - they're only perceptible to the kind of intelligence which is capable of counting. But for any such intelligence, they're the same (speaking of integers, anyway). — Wayfarer
The problem is you can't say what sense "real" could have in what you are trying to articulate, and you fall into the error that Wittgenstein warns against of trying to say what cannot be said. — Janus
But this does not justify reifying immateriality as a substance, which is what you are doing. Why repeat Descartes' error? — Janus
An abstraction like universals, numbers, or possible worlds would be real if they aren't created by the mind. — Marchesk
Also, when you say "nature exists in mind" there seems to be no coherent idea of what mind could be in this context. — Janus
Consider a discussion about the technicalities of the eucharist. Within the Christian Church, it would be a meaningful discussion because all agree that the coherence with the words in the bible is the metric by which ideas are measured. But include a Muslim, or an atheist in the debate and it becomes meaningless, how are the Christian and the atheist going to analyse the ideas in any joint way?
So it is with metaphysics, there is no agreement among the participants in the discussion about what it is that measures 'rightness'. Even attempts to do so like coherence, consistency, simplicity are all far too vague to achieve anything. Virtually every metaphysical proposition ever written is thought by some to be coherent, consistent and simple (enough). It's just too easy to meet these criteria and most philosophers are clever enough to do so. — Pseudonym
1.2 The philosophical significance of mathematical platonism
Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects which aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences.[1] Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate.
In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness.
It is through the mind that nature is disclosed to sentient beings, and the nature of their cognitive processes determines a great deal about the nature of their world. — Wayfarer
Why, if the mind is a real aspect of nature, must something be mind-independent to be counted as real? — Janus
That is still much too vague. — SophistiCat
Universals are a class of mind-independent entities, usually contrasted with individuals (or so-called "particulars"), postulated to ground and explain relations of qualitative identity and resemblance among individuals. Individuals are said to be similar in virtue of sharing universals. An apple and a ruby are both red, for example, and their common redness results from sharing a universal. If they are both red at the same time, the universal, red, must be in two places at once. This makes universals quite different from individuals; and it makes them controversial.
Whether universals are in fact required to explain relations of qualitative identity and resemblance among individuals has engaged metaphysicians for two thousand years. Disputants fall into one of three broad camps. Realists endorse universals. Conceptualists and Nominalists, on the other hand, refuse to accept universals and deny that they are needed. Conceptualists explain similarity among individuals by appealing to general concepts or ideas, things that exist only in minds. Nominalists, in contrast, are content to leave relations of qualitative resemblance brute and ungrounded. — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
. But in any case, to paraphrase Crispin Wright, identifying your position with one of the above labels accomplishes about as much as clearing one's throat. — SophistiCat
A class in object-oriented programming (OOP) is not a good analogy for the general idea of universals. In OOP two objects with the same functional properties are not necessarily instances of the same class. — SophistiCat
Are you saying that you do find the debate meaningful for some reason that does not require a shared metric, or that my conclusion that there's no shared metric is mistaken? — Pseudonym
So with science, you may say that there's no definitive shared metric, and you'd be right, but the correlation of some theoretical proposition with empirical measurements is sufficiently shared and just specific enough to allow meaningful debate. It's not so shared that people like Kuhn can't highlight its reliance on paradigm, but they're shared enough. — Pseudonym
I think both definitions share the same features. There is meaning to a proposition of the type "phenomenon X is caused by/explained by Y for reasons a, b and c". The meaning is the story such a proposition tells for one looking for just such a story. But propositions of the sort "proposition X is wrong because a, b and c" is meaningless because there is no accompanying definition of wrong which the reader is bound to agree with. I might as well say proposition X is 'vgarstenfad' because a, b and c". That would also be nonsense because you'd have no idea what 'vgarstenfad' means nor any reason to accept any definition of the word I might give.
So in that sense I do think there's an argument for saying that such propositions are meaningless in your first sense, but it is in the second sense that my interest lies. — Pseudonym
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.